Domain of Alien Memories

Darklord. @The God-Brain of Bluetspur

Genre. Cosmic Horror

Hallmarks. Alien abductions, otherworldly landscapes, untrustworthy memories, monstrous experimentation

Mist Talismans. @Dream Journal, @Metallic Implant, @Scrap of Bizarre Technology

Protean apocalypses scar the impossible vistas of @Bluetspur, and none who witness them remember. This alien domain etches itself not upon the waking mind, but rather upon the body as inexplicable scars and on the psyche through nightmares.

Not all the Domains of Dread are drawn from worlds hospitable to life. @Bluetspur's scale and impossible geometry induce instinctual anxiety. Gaseous tempests whirl upon the hooked peaks of gravity-defying mountains, oily spires twist in semi-organic contortions, caustic fumaroles yawn and snap shut hungrily, and above it all hangs a dying red orb. Little can survive this wasteland, which is why Bluetspur's masters dwell underground.

Beneath the alien surface, the @Mind Flayers of @Bluetspur drift through the howling darkness of their ancient metropolis-laboratory. Within this sprawling installation, the illithids' numbers are few and their tentacles twitch with undisguised urgency. They toil to prevent the unthinkable: their primordial leader, @The God-Brain of Bluetspur, is dying. Through these end times, the mind flayers work desperately to reconcile their god's demented whims even as they struggle to delay its demise. To those ends, their tentacles slip through @The Mists to drag unwitting souls back to Bluetspur for all manner of experiments. Many abductees are returned with only psychic scars, while others are never seen again. An unlucky few find themselves set upon strange routes leading back to the alien realm, arriving only to realize they've visited Bluetspur before.

Noteworthy Features

Those few people who glimpse @Bluetspur know it only as a nameless realm from their impossible dreams. These visions share the following facts:

• The land's surface is a lethal, alien place, scattered with the ruins of long-extinct civilizations.

• A mountain—massive beyond all words—looms as a constant presence and thrums with a soundless pulse that nonetheless demands attention. Misshapen shadows crawl among its fissures.

• Those who dream of events in this land often bear inexplicable scars, marks lending impossible evidence to their visions.

Settlements and Sites

@Bluetspur Surface is vast, spanning a continent-sized region that is hostile to all but the most tenacious forms of life. Due to the endless assault of supernatural weather and earthquakes, civilization—as defined by the illithids—exists entirely below the ground. @The Mists encroach even here, filling shadowed chasms and abandoned corridors. While the @Mind Flayers have their own ways of describing the realm's features, the half-lucid ramblings of those who dream of the domain stretch to name and relate several prominent sites.

@Mount Makab

Calling Makab a mountain is a wild misnomer; it is a malignant deformation on a planetary scale, a spire with no apparent summit. Its contorted slopes stretch into the toxic heavens, and its form occupies the periphery of viewers' attention no matter which direction they look.

Mount Makab is not a natural feature, but rather part of a colossal, illithid-designed device. Its purposes remain largely mysterious to outsiders, but one thing is certain: it amplifies psionic energy, allowing @Bluetspur's @Mind Flayers to project their thoughts into other Domains of Dread.

The @Citadel Subterrene

Below @Mount Makab stretches the hive-like lair of the illithids. This @Mind Flayer metropolis comprises innumerable interconnected compounds—laboratory vaults, custom prison-habitats, @Intellect Devourer Preserves, incubation domes, brain-filled @Synapse Librarys, testing hippodromes, surgical theaters, and facilities that beggar rational description. Non-illithids find travel within the citadel maddening, like trying to find a specific point within a writhing knot of worms. Locations are inaccessible to creatures reliant upon basic terrestrial mobility or without the ability to access psionically controlled mechanisms. Entering the Citadel Subterrene is simple, though, as fissures across @Bluetspur Surface, particularly upon Mount Makab, lead within.

The @Chamber of the God-Brain

The Chamber of @The God-Brain rests miles below the @Citadel Subterrene. The cathedral-like chamber is roughly ovoid in shape, with walls of gleaming, organic metal. The massive God-Brain trembles in a pool of medicinal brine and experimental chemicals capable of dissolving most other creatures. The massive, alien brain's affliction is clear from the leaking holes pocking its deep-wrinkled lobes. Illithid attendants in eerie protective garb endlessly attend to their dying overlord and indulge even its most blasphemous schemes, such as the creation of @Vampiric Mind Flayers.

@Mount Grysl

Mount Grysl's polypous spires once served as a secondary installation of the domain's resident @Mind Flayers, but the residents rebelled against @The God-Brain's self-serving obsessions. As one might amputate an infected limb, the God-Brain cut off Mount Grysl from its psychic network. The abandoned residents largely succumbed to infighting and each other's amoral experiments. The spirits of these tormented mind flayers remain within Mount Grysl, as does the rebellion's leader: a bloated deviant that calls itself the High Master (@Srauss) and seeks to undermine the God-Brain.

@The God-Brain

The scope of what @Mind Flayers call history exists on a cosmic scale. Through ages of empire and conflict, the illithid @Elder Brains indulged experiments without comparison or reference for lesser beings, explorations beyond the boundaries of time, reality, immortality, and the multiverse. Many failed—at least one catastrophically so.

To summarize an eon of atrocities, one @Elder Brain's reality-bending research had an unexpected result, revealing to it a malignant truth for which existence was unprepared. Guided by this burgeoning revelation, the elder brain turned and preyed upon its peers, consuming their discoveries and their physical forms to fuel an impossible apotheosis. Ultimately, though, the weight of the elder brain's deeds caused its own physicality to rebel, giving rise to an alien disease that began devouring its fleshy form. Horrified by an affliction that infected only them, the other elder brains united and psionically expelled the diseased brain from existence.

Or so they thought.

From a place without time or reality, the Dark Powers plucked the dying @Elder Brain and planted it upon a tormented world. Ever since, @The God-Brain of @Bluetspur has dreamed and desperately indulged ever more demented schemes as it seeks to save its own life and give action to a thought alien even to it.

The God-Brain's Powers and Dominion

@The God-Brain is more akin to a physical location or massive object than a creature. Its droves of servants are more direct threats than the inscrutable Darklord itself.

Overmind. The God-Brain commands untold numbers of @Mind Flayers, @Intellect Devourers, and other creatures. Within @Bluetspur, it is constantly telepathically linked with all its servants and knows anything that they know. The God-Brain delegates broad goals to its most effective servants, encouraging them to indulge all manner of radical experiments.

Mist Vibrations. Through the awesome psychic resonances of @Mount Makab, the God-Brain can guide any of its servants or other psychically aligned minds through @The Mists to @Bluetspur. In effect, it provides a vision or dream of the domain that itself functions as a Mist Talisman.

Life Support. The illithids of @Bluetspur toil to save their @Elder Brain through all manner of outlandish scientific and medical means. Among the most bizarre of these schemes is the God-Brain's own: the creation of degenerate servants that hunt for balms for its affliction. These @Vampiric Mind Flayers slip from Bluetspur to prey upon Humanoids. They then return to the God-Brain, bloated with cerebrospinal fluid to momentarily dull its suffering.

Closing the Borders. When the God-Brain closes @Bluetspur's borders, the surface of the domain is wracked by extreme electrical storms, and alien vapors rise at the domain's distant edges and within its hidden tunnels. Rather than barring creatures' escape, these Mists repress memories. Any non-@Aberration who leaves Bluetspur is transported to a familiar place where they soon wake up, even if they weren't previously asleep. Their time in Bluetspur is repressed, altered as if by the Modify Memory spell. See the Recovering Memories section of the Adventures in Bluetspur & Return to Bluetspur lore article for more details.

@The God-Brain's Torment

The God-Brain of @Bluetspur is an entirely unreliable cosmic entity, an immortal inflicted with mortality. Although its death is likely still millennia away, this inevitability leads it to hastily indulge all manner of amoral extremes.

Roleplaying @The God-Brain

The God-Brain's influence drives the @Mind Flayers beyond their domain to purse all manner of subtle observations, bizarre experiments, repeat abductions, and visceral mutilations.